


Shuffle

by Prosodi



Category: Left 4 Dead 2
Genre: Backstory, Explicit Sexual Content, M/M, Non-Linear Narrative, Pre-Canon
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-02-01
Updated: 2012-02-01
Packaged: 2017-10-30 10:50:06
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,154
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/330919
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Prosodi/pseuds/Prosodi
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Nick's always been a gambler, an opportunist, a magpie - he just doesn't know if those are good qualities to have during the zombie apocalypse.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Shuffle

Shattering glass and rebar scatter like canon fire outward from the car as it leaps through the glass doors, powering through zombies and churning them up: gristle in the grinder. It is literally the most gloriously uncomfortable Nick has been in his entire life - jammed up behind two bucket seats, sandwiched between the steel roll cage and the nonexistent back seat, elbowing Rochelle and getting a knee in the side over every bump and lurch in the road (or poor-bastard-zombie). Shells and loose ammunition roll under his knees and he has to brace himself with both hands to keep from knocking himself out. In the front seat, Ellis is whooping it up like this is literally the best day of his life. And Nick would stare at the woman lurching around next to him if he could get the time to; they've fallen in with a crazy person, the look would say.

Instead Nick holds on as they crunch through bone and marrow, as bodies slide up the stock car's hood and over, as they power through chain link fencing out onto the highway, to the interstate.

"New Orleans, here we come!" the big guy, Coach (seriously?) bellows and his elbow is actually hooked out the open window. Beside him, behind the wheel, the hillbilly is grinning lopsided with his baseball cap pulled low. He turns on the windshield wipers and blood smears across the glass.  
The girl starts it, and in a few seconds Nick can hear himself laughing. Jesus Christ, he can't believe they're not dead. 

 

This is how it starts for him:

When Nick is twenty-two, he loiters in casinos and casino bars with his shirt sleeves crisply ironed, with cheap cufflinks and cheaper suits. He plays cards because it's fun and easy; he plays Hold 'Em because he's smarter than your average fannypack wearing tourist. And in the yellow glare of the in-house bar, he meets a lithe dark haired young thing with a backless blue dress.

She is dark and supple and smooth and she drinks these completely ridiculous girly drinks that literally make him cringe. She smiles at him from down the length of the bar: a lazy quirk of the corner of her mouth just visible over the line of her knuckles and the rim of her carmeltini. In the spinning mess of polo shirts and tank tops, glitzy spangled Texas makeup consultant mom tops, she draws his eye like the ball bouncing in a roulette table. He can feel himself smile back at her.

In the elevator she plays coy with both hands braced against the rail and her chin tipped up, head lolled just far enough back that Nick can examine the line of her throat from out of his peripherals. She's older than he is by three or four years, maybe even five. Close up she doesn't look as little as she did at the bar: when she puts her weight on one foot, the hip that faintly thrusts out is round and soft. Her wrists are thin, but her hands slightly mannish. Later, when she steps out of her bed - hers, it won't be much later until Nick can afford this kind of room by himself - he will take the time to study the line of her shoulders and the curve of her lower back. It's not the kind of thing he gets to appreciate except for when a woman is walking away from him.

He leaves his cufflinks there: a strategic move that he uses the evening after while leaning over the desk in the MGM lobby.

"Hey there sweetheart, could you call down a friend of mine. She's in room 902." He fiddles with hotel's stock business card holder, takes one and fidgets. Taps it repeatedly on the counter as the slick young woman behind the computer clacks away at the keyboard with crisply manicured fingernails. She has small blue crystals glued onto them. Like most things in Vegas, it's tacky.

"I'm sorry sir, but the guest seems to have checked out early."

He stops tapping the business card, oddly startled. He doesn't know what he'd been expecting, but it wasn't that. Not really. Shit. He says it out loud and the bedazzled young woman apologizes - dry, mechanical.

Outside, the limos and taxis spin past the front of the hotel and Nick smokes standing over one of many lion faced ashtrays while he watches valets load people into cars. Vegas is a bizarre fucking combination of the deliriously rich and the lower middleclass. It's call girls and meth-head hookers, Bellagio shows and street magicians. Sharp and hazy, neon and smoke. It's disorienting.

He pinches the bridge of his nose, grimaces and goes digging through his wallet. He could use a drink. Instead of walking back to his hotel, he'll catch a cab and find a dive bar at the edge of town where he can play pool and hustle bikers out of their money.

In his wallet he finds playing cards where Visa and MasterCard used to be: "What the fuck." Where his cash should be, there are the cheap cufflinks.

So Nicks swears off dark eyed women for life and marries a petite blonde who cries and cries and cries when he goes to prison. From the inside, behind a thick plate a bullet proof glass, under the buzzing florescent lighting and with a phone cradled against his ear, he can suddenly see how pale she is. She twists the wedding band on her ring finger and looks exhausted.

"Where's that tennis bracelet I bought you? You wear it all the time," Nick demands.

Her lower lip trembles and he can feel something tighten in his stomach. "Oh Nicky, I had to get rid of it."

That night, Nick lays in his bunk with both his arms tucked up behind his head and he stares at the ceiling for a long time. His fingers are itchy for a deck of cards more than they are for cigarettes.

She's dead weight, he says to himself. It has nothing to do with the fact that he can't buy her a house and expensive private schools for the kids she might want to have. It has nothing to do with the fact that for him, it's about the winning. It's about staying at the table because there is no such thing as retiring, just quitting. It isn't about how it's fucking uncomfortable the way she looks from the inside of prison - tired and drawn out and gray. Isn't about how it makes him feel remote and distant in a way that makes him guilty as shit. It isn't like how it makes him feel like he's playing slots again, before he got smart. Watching her chew on her lip and pick anxiously at her cuticles somehow comes off as a lot like killing someone. 

He gets a lawyer and divorces her while he‘s still put away. It's the shitty kind of divorce and by the time Nick gets out, he's not only decided to carry a deck of cards in his jacket pocket and that he'll never wear a cheap suit again, but he's also forgotten most of the ways he loved her what with losing the house, the cars. Mostly it feels like graduating. It felt like the right thing to do at the time.

 

They have to pull over once it starts to get dark because both headlights are busted. Ellis steers off the interstate when they spot a gas station and once they blow the heads of both store clerks, it's just a matter of filling the stock car's tank again and pulling it as close to the door as possible. Nick squats over the manager's corpse and fishes a key lanyard out of the gore with two fingers: "Gross, gross, gross."

Somewhere a generator is running. All the beer is cold. Once inside they pull the security gate down over the doors and eat burritos wrapped in tinfoil, plastic-sealed egg salad sandwiches. Rochelle fishes bags out from behind the counter, stuffs them full of Butterfingers and dried fruit and power bars while Nick—

"Oh, hell-o honey," he murmurs, the cash register door sliding out under his fingers. He pries the key out of the drawer. "Hey overalls, catch!" Tosses the lanyard and clanking keys to the redneck slack jaw who ducks out of the way and lets them ping off gallons of water and onto the floor.

Rochelle gives Nick this look: raised eyebrow, mouth quirked to one side, chin tilted a little up. She's young and pretty in that Won't Take Shit kind of way, which is pretty much the polar opposite of what Nick likes. He's a dick from Jersey and his rings click against the drawer's dividers as she says, "I hate to tell you this, but I don't think you're going to need cash any time soon."

Nick snorts. "You always need money." Stuffing twenties into his wallet is just the right kind of satisfying. It's like scratching an itch. It's familiar territory.

And she's right, probably. Even at his most optimistic, Nick can't think of a scenario where having a plump wallet and an expensive suit is going to do him much good for the next couple of weeks. They'll get evacuated to some shelter, probably sleep on government provided cots and eat crappy food and it'll be processing hell.

Looking across the store, this is what he can see: Rochelle fishing a cold soda out of the open container, wet to the elbow from melted ice. Ellis sitting on the ground and wiping gore from his forehead, examining his baseball cap: "Aw shit, I hope these stains'll come out." Coach with a freezer door open, refrigerated air. It's the opposite of clean, the other end of the spectrum from orderly and crisp and neat.

Nick wipes his hands on the lapels of his suit and then slams the cash register drawer. It makes everyone jump, including him. It's embarrassing. Makes his eyes slant away and toward-

"Hey! There's a radio here!"

Ellis is up and over the counter faster than Nick can even get himself to haul the rickety old box down next to the register. "Oh hell yeah! Look at this, Ro! I bet you're right and there'll be all kinds of broadcasts."

"Sure bet there are," Coach rumbles, limps over and hooks his forearms over the counter while Nick fends the kid off with his elbows.

"Get off me. Let me just--" Fiddles with the radio. Sucks in a breath and sets his jaw and Rochelle circles around the counter says, "Try the antennae" and gets a "Yeah, yeah okay!"

Twists the knob, skates through the whistle of static air. FM and then AM, skimming through numbers like meaningless symbols on a slot machine.

Nothing.

After a few minutes Nick sits back, pulls his hands away from it and Ellis takes his place. The kid's hands are gritty and grease stained, black around the knuckles and under his nails. He fiddles with the dial. Nick can feel the edge of the counter digging into the small of his back. Ellis' face is scuffed and nicked up, a couple seconds worth of abandonment sinking into the corners of his mouth. All of them clump together like sheep around the whippoorwill of radio silence.

 

The last time Nick got to know a stranger:

It's a long flight and he drinks scotch on the rocks, spends a lot of time fiddling with the in-flight dining menu and feigning sleep to avoid talking to the elderly man sitting next to him. It doesn't work as well as he hopes despite the rebuffs like, "I’m beat" or talking over him to the pretty flight attendant. Instead the old guy just troops on, crunching airline pretzels and sipping his water, no ice, and yammering on and on and on and looking more and more like Colonel Sanders the longer Nick tries to avoid direct eye contact.

"I'm going to visit my daughter and her son-in-law. And he's a bastard, let me tell you."

"She's been seeing the doctor about all sorts of things these days. Crazy, am I right? Headaches and fevers. In my day doctors told us to suck it up; but she's my girl, you know. Haha. Would coddle her like a kitten if she was still home, right?"

"They told me to come down to help take care of the kids while they run her through clinic. Christ."

By the time they hit the tarmac, Nick could probably fill a book - or at least a sizable pamphlet - with what he knows about this guy and his family.

They turn their cell phones on. Nick immediately goes looking to see if his connection is running on time. Counts down the minutes to when he can get away, escape out into the bustling terminal and lose himself somewhere between the men's bathroom and the in-house bookstore.

Next to him and all at once, the old man crumples and drops his phone out into the aisle of the plane. Nick thinks heart attack, mouth gone suddenly dry except then the old man rocks and wails into his wrinkled hands. One of the flight attendants hurries over.

"Sir? Sir, what's wrong?"

"Oh god, my little girl. My little girl."

Nick feels like a sardine: squashed against the side of the jet, elbow jammed against the window. The stewardess helps the old man out of his seat and they limp down the aisle to the remote privacy at the back of plane and Nick forgets he hasn't unbuckled his seat belt until the plane docks and he tries to get up and catches himself and Jesus Fuck Shit Goddammit Fuck.

 

"The red dude on that billboard."

"Nope."

"That barn way out there?"

"Not even close."

"Oh hey, I know! I bet it's Rochelle!"

"What the hell, Ellis?!"

"Your shirt's sorta red."

"Did they not teach you colors in school either?"

"Oh, ha ha--"

"All of y'all need to shut the hell up. It's the bitch blood all over the hood."

"Ding ding we have a winner!"

"Oh come on now that ain't fair at all."

"It's outside of the car."

"Well sure it is but--"

"--I SPY. WITH MY LITTLE GODDAMN EYE--"

 

He has more scrapes, cuts and gashes than he knows what to do with. His sleeve sticks to him, pulling at the hair on his arm when he peels the sleeve up to bare the oozing scrape across the skin. Infected or barbed wire or who knows what. All of them are beat to shit and back, locked into a supply closet with the door barricaded. One way in, one way out. Boxes of copy paper are a poor substitute for the food they haven't eaten for at least a day. Nick bandages himself up, swearing under his breath instead of counting to ten. It's more cathartic this way.

"Hey buddy, you want help with that?"

Ellis has mud smeared over every article of clothing, whatever logo was on the shirt obscured by swamp and getting knocked into the dirt and god knows what else. Nick grunts, curls his lip, but that doesn't help to get the bandage tied.

"Sure kid, have a party." He offers out his arm and Ellis immediately undoes all his work, hodgepodging it back together slowly, albeit a little neater than Nick was managing with one hand.

"Hey, did I ever tell you about the time me and my buddy--"

Jammed against a filing cabinet with his knee elevated and blood speckling the front of his shirt, Coach groans. Rochelle pants, says, "Ellis baby, not now."

Thank Christ. Nick sucks down air and for a few seconds they're all quiet. Ellis vibrates next to him: pulls the brim of his baseball cap down over his eyes and then pushes it up again. Once, twice. At last Nick can’t take it and he fumbles inside his jacket until he manages to slip the deck of cards out of the pocket.

"Hold ’Em anyone?" His voice cracks, rasping. A grin that cuts like a knife and pulls at a cut above his eyebrow. 

Coach waves him off nearly wordlessly, punctuated with a "Hell" and Rochelle says something like, "Do you have any food hidden in there?" and then just doesn't say anything.

Nick chuckles, hoarse. Looks at Ellis. "Well?"

"Oh heck, sure. But only if I get to shuffle. Oh man, this one time--"

"Deal." Grunting, Nick shoves the soggy dock of cards into his fingers.

And he's pretty much the sloppiest card dealer Nick has seen in his life. He watched back alley card games and cheap ass bars and even played go-fish with some kid in a Galveston bus stop, but Ellis takes the cake. He spills the cards everywhere, shows half his hand before the game is dealt. Part of it might be the cards: bent and crooked and dog eared, worn down to nothing from too much shuffling and then made worse by rain and foul weather, gore and acid and whatever else. Part of it might be Ellis' hands: stiff from swinging a baseball bat, fingers permanently twisted around the stock of a gun, nails cracked and fingers busted up from sliding off a wet ladder.

"No cheatin’ now," Ellis tells him, eyeballs him sideways.

Nick studiously rolls his other sleeve up to the elbow. He cracks his fingernails and stretches, turns a ring on one finger. "Sure, I won't mess with you. I've seen Deliverance."

He doesn't need to cheat anyway. Ellis fucks up the first hand in record time: "Ellis, what the fuck. None of those cards even go together," and "Alright give me the hat."

"Come on Nick, you're killin’ me here!"

"Hat."

Nick wears it through the next three hands to spite him. Can't wear the rest of it though: Ellis' shoes, socks, shirt. There's something grimly satisfying in literally winning the clothes off his back and in watching Ellis' face get more and more set with each losing hand. Determined. It's legitimately hilarious, the best time Nick has had in forfuckingever. Ellis counts cards like he's on Sesame Street and with his feet bare, Nick can see the way his toes twitch instead of his fingers.

If nothing else, Nick is well versed in tells. Good at telling people where to go, giving running orders. Don't fucking do that, do fucking do that right this fucking second shit. He catches the way Rochelle holds her breath before they open every door, glances up. Thinks she might be the only person in Hollywood - or whatever cheap knockoff she'd been a part of - who still might go to church. Or had gone. Would go. Coach limps, but more then that when they sit on top of buildings, he knows where to go like it's an innate fucking skill. Like he's strategizing. Looks at the ground like a fucking chalkboard. And Ellis beats the shit out of oozing, slobbering, gore and vomit and pus filled infected like he things he's every single action hero ever except then his mouth slopes down, down, down in the dark, lights off. He brushes against them all and that's either him being afraid of the dark, or paranoid one of them's gone down without him realizing.

Keith, Keith, Keith says Ellis and Nick bets good money on the second one.

Finally, Nick throws in the cards. "Stop, stop. Christ, let me show you how to do it right. Pay attention cause I'm only telling you once."

Rochelle, watching with her head pillowed on a roll of bubble wrap, laughs out loud. Says to Ellis, "Honey, if you ever start winning you better strip this bastard for all he's worth."

Ellis' mouth twists, lips parted and stubborn, "Well--"

 

"--shit shit shit. Run, run, RUN!"

It's fucking slippery and they're not going to make it and that bitch is right on their tail and fuck him, it's raining so hard he can barely make out the lurching line of Coach's shoulders against the darkness. His shoes are worn thin, slick and completely fucking void of any grip on the sole. If he had more time, he might abandon the crowbar in hand to just fucking haul himself along the grating hand over hand and—

A huge gust of wind barrels him forward straight into her, crunching them both against the railing and for a brief second he feels Rochelle slam back into him. And then she twists, flounders, something slides and Nick can feel her boomeranging forward. Up and over and slipping out of reach before he can ever realize she'd ever been in it. Has time to shout, lost in the howl, and then she's gone over the side.

They can't go back. Too fucking many to go that way. Limping and bleeding and worn thin by the wind and fingers numb from the cold. Nick's hands keep slipping up and he loses the crowbar in someone's skull. It takes too fucking long to drive them back, find a way down and the beat their way slowly and painfully back to where he thinks they lost her.

"RO?! RO GIRL WHERE ARE YOU?"

It's the stupidest fucking thing ever to yell, but Nick and Coach can't shut Ellis up and eventually they're all fucking shouting and Christ. Fuck. This is so stupid fucking god dammit - she'd been right there. Right fucking there.

It's a tangled mess of machinery and piping and sliding in the mud and it's so fucking dark. Nick can't hear himself think; she'll never hear them calling. No med kits and besides they're useless as shit in the rain, no flashlights beams because there are crazy bitches weeping on the wind. They comb the area anyway, hand over fucking hand.

He doesn't have a watch, doesn't know how long it goes on. Tries to count. Keeps losing it. Finally Nick lets the wind catch him: it snaps him up and he turns his back, shoulders bowed against the current. He grabs out at the nearest body, catches Ellis by the collar. Yells. Can't hear him. Has to jam his jaw up against the kid’s and shout into his ear: "WE HAVE TO GO."

Ellis struggles, shoves at him. Claws at his hand and pushes him away and fucking fuck Nick forgets he can be this strong. Coach lets them do it: lets Nick get hold of Ellis again and they twist and struggle and shove and kick until finally, fucking finally Nick trips him up and throws him down into the mud. Ellis kicks his legs out and Nick crashes down but it's over after a few seconds, on their back and knees: sucking down air and trying not to drown until Nick feels a strong hand at the scruff of his neck, pulling him up by the collar of his jacket.

Coach does the same for Ellis. Hauls him up by the arm.

"Let's roll," he yells, divides it between the two of them.

They drag themselves, hauled like so much livestock, pushed forward by the storm. Nick can feel the gale pounding at his back, covering and smothering until his chest aches with the effort to breathe.

It takes literally for-fucking-fuck-shit-god-damnit-fucking-fuck-ever to find somewhere safe to hole up. Crusted with mud, soaked to the bone, Nick rips his jacket off and slings it, mud splattering, across the length of the shitty boarded up room. His shoes follow: BANG. BANG, against the wall. He peels off his socks, unsatisfied with the way they travel when he chucks them with the same deliberate force.

Pauses, realizes how fucking exhausted he is, and jerks: chin up, back straightening. He glares around at Ellis and then Coach and then picks up his shoes and jacket from off the floor. "Ellis, wash your face," he snaps.

"Hey now, Nicholas--" Coach calls, low and growling and—

"Fuck off," he says over his shoulder before he goes to find a bathroom, swears to Christ if he doesn't find running water he's going to punch someone.

 

They don't talk about it. In the morning they go out to look around, but none of them can ever remember where they lost her. There's no time for standing around or memorials or any of that shit and besides Ellis suggests she might be okay anyway - that Ro's a tough cookie. That he bets she got up and walked off without them. Nick's kindness doesn't stretch far enough to humor him.

Instead they move on and when they stop again Nick pulls out the pack of cards and teaches Ellis to shuffle. They play again and again, Nick systematically stripping Ellis down to his underwear while Coach cleans the gore off guns, re-sorts the ammunition stock, wants nothing to do with the con artist.

It becomes habitual, a scientific exercise. It’s practiced until rote, a daily ceremony that follows eating and comes before sleeping. It is silent save for the bare essentials - until Ellis starts to talk to him again anyway. Most of all, it's a well-known loop of defeat until:

"Alright, gimme your jacket," Ellis says. He's shirtless, still wearing the baseball cap. No shoes, no socks, but a full house spread across his side of the floor.

Coach snorts from across the room where he is rolled onto his side on a moldy couch and trying to sleep. He's not even looking at them anymore - the card game is pretty damn trivial by now.

"Huh." Nick feels himself make a face, eyebrows quirking. Go fucking figure. It only took, what? Eighty hands? Maybe more. "Nice job, kid." He sheds the jacket, balls it up and tosses it over.

Ellis makes a seat cushion out of it.

"Oh, come on! Do you know how much that's worth?"

And Ellis, the fucking redneck Pabst-sucker, shrugs and grins. Pulls the cards to him and reshuffles. His hands are still sort of awkward, but Nick doesn't notice as much anymore. "I don't want to speak outta turn Nick, but uh. I sort've doubt it's as good with all the zombie blood all over it and stuff."

"Vintage," Nick grumbles. "Just deal the cards, Jethro Bodine."

He does. And maybe Nick's tired - sleepy, bone weary, or maybe just tired of the routine and the mechanism of having no place to go but here; either way, his luck turns, the cards go sour and in two more hands he's lost his shirt and his shoes. In a few more and he gets Ellis down to just his boxers and ball cap, though he's hardly better off - socks, pants, underwear. It's close.

Nick sacrifices his socks to Ellis' pair of Kings.

And shit, the change is Ellis' face making Nick wish he'd started losing sooner: the guy lets his shoulders loose in a way he hasn't, and his face gets young and soft and earnest. He stops pursing his lips, starts breathing through his mouth again and it's all just disgustingly relieving. When he slaps down another winning hand, it's like winning the fucking lottery: "Oh shit, I'm amazing!"

Coach growls at them and at once they both snap their heads over, cowed boys playing too loudly while dad's asleep. Nick feels like they've been caught red-handed at something before he has the common sense to tell himself that's bullshit and what the fuck does he owe anyone. Just as Coach says, "Get out or shut up."

Ellis exchanges a quick glance. They both glance at the cards.

"Hey I think I saw a kid's room or somethin’ next door-"

"Get the cards."

Ellis does and they gather up the other's clothes like ransom, skedaddling to the adjacent bedroom, legs and sides bruised and cut up and battered and bandages over gashes. 

It's warm enough despite the darkness, and not even the small hairs at the back of Nick's thighs prickle at the marginally cooler air in the bedroom. Not that it isn't a little weird as they bunk down on the woven rug, cheap glow in the dark stickers overhead and anonymous gouges dug into the floral wallpaper. Nick gets his back up against the white wrought iron bed, lets Ellis shuffle while he squirms out of his pants and kicks them aside.

He studies Ellis as the cards are dealt, searching out the slight hints on his face. Doesn't want to lose anymore. Just needs to get that stupid hat and then it'll be even ground and they can call a draw and get back to behaving like normal human beings do in a crisis (which Nick generally thinks of as having more paranoid watch cycles and sleeping curled up in a ball).

Nick counts his breathing, studies the way Ellis twitches and shifts and fidgets. It's easy once he's paying attention, once he knows what he's looking for and actually cares to do it. The kid can be so fucking simple to read and Nick has spent his whole life relying on simple, easily understood people. He's made a life out being a step ahead, working on two. When he puts down his cards, he knows he's getting that ball cap.

Except that Ellis beats him, fair and fucking square: every card laid out face up, the cardstock warped and the color running. It takes Nick a second to recover from the whiplash and by the time he does Ellis is already grinning at him, nine kinds of triumphant. He has the fucking audacity to take the baseball hat off and swipe his forehead with the back of his arm.

"Christ in a hand basket, that was real close." Then he looks at Nick, expectant.

"Oh come on. You're not seriously going to take my underwear are you?"

"Sure am. Pony up, m'man."

"This is ridiculous. I'm not giving you my boxers.”

They're not exactly playing strip poker. That's the stupidest thing Nick's heard in his entire life - who the fuck plays strip poker during the zombie apocalypse or what the hell ever? It was just...the right kind of currency to use in this situation. It's not strip poker, it's…common sense.

"If you want, I can get 'em off you myself--"

"Fuck off, Ellis."

It's sharp and sudden and Nick doesn't expect it at all: Ellis rolling forward and catching his leg with one hand, and Nick kicks out instinctively. He catches Ellis in the ribs: "Ow shit! What was that for?!"

"Oh I dunno -- assault maybe? Get off me."

"Ro said--"

His blood runs cold, small hairs at the back of his neck prickling and Nick stills. Feels a line of tension pull tight between his shoulder blades as he meets Ellis' eye: soft and vulnerable, the corner of his mouth turned low in a lopsided frown and brow furrowed like he's trying not to… Shit, Nick doesn't know. He's used to people covering their faces before they start to look that way. Anyway, Ellis' hand is soft on his leg despite the rough run of calluses up and down the fingers and across the palm.

"Do you seriously want to talk about this now?" Nick asks, feels the curve of his back grinding against the foot of the bed and not much else between it and Ellis' hand on his bare knee. The skin's warm.

There's something miserable and fucking messed up about the way Ellis just kind of shrugs with one shoulder, not quite looking away in the process but not really meeting Nick's eye the same way either. It's unnerving, makes his stomach twist uncomfortably. "I mean, I dunno. Hell one time me 'n Keith--"

"Ellis. Focus."

He sets his jaw then and Nick can feel Ellis' fingers hold tighter on his knee. The kid clears his throat roughly and Nick can see the way he pinches his lower lip between his teeth before talking. He hasn't really noticed it before. It's the little things, like the bruises on the inside of Ellis' wrist shaped like fingerprints or the Nike swoosh of a scrape over one cheek.

"I just feel shitty, is all. There wasn't anything we-- Hell, beats me what we coulda done. But you're all guilty and stuff and that blows, I guess. And I just... think that's sort of awful. It wasn't really your fault or anything and it was really crap weather and stuff and--" Ellis has the decency to cut himself off for once in his goddamn life. It's enough to let Nick breathe again, gives him space to stop fucking grinding his teeth together like he's going to pop Ellis right in the nose.

"So I guess can I just take your underthings already, or what?"

One beat. Two beats. Nick grunts, "Or what," and it's not really a question, just something to say. Pours out of his mouth like spare change from pockets, but something about it makes Ellis look down and away and his fingers fumble and-- Sharp and sudden he looks back and it makes Nick bristle. Makes him feel nervous, doesn't really know how these odds work. New game, unfamiliar rules. Ellis' fucking hand on his fucking knee.

"Hey, uh Nick?"

He doesn't have any context for what the hell that's actually a question about, but he says, "Sure" like he does. And that's the answer Ellis is looking for or maybe just the one he takes because his fingers go loose and he uses his other hand to steady himself when Ellis leans down to kiss him. And Nick can't even bring himself to be Not Okay with this: the smoke and gunpowder and dirt smell in Ellis' skin and the rough scrape of his fingers scoured into the shape of a shotgun, a baseball, a fucking guitar, against his leg. So much so that for a few seconds Nick lets him get away with it.

And then his hands twitch up and he shoves the baseball cap roughly off the back of Ellis' head, hears it bang on the floorboards and then he gets a fistful of Ellis’ hair. It earns a grunted, "Ownick" against his mouth and then a rough slide of hands once the realization dawns that he's not letting go. And Ellis lets go of the bed frame, fumbles instead down the waistband of Nick's underwear; his squared fingers are warm and stuttering, and Nick thinks suddenly about teaching Ellis how to fucking shuffle a deck of cards, and that the stupid kid is just a kid, though not as simple as he'd prefer and maybe not quite as dumb as he wants him to be.

Because yeah, Ellis is smart enough to do the right things with his hands and there's something sort of gut satisfying in a gross, skeevy level to have Ellis leaning over him, blocking him in with both arms while he palms up Nick's erection under the tent of his boxers. And after a while none of it is soft or gentle or halting as Nick's fingers dig sharply into Ellis' shoulder, twist in his hair, as he makes low growling noises, pants into the claustrophobic space between them as Ellis' thumb works the head of his cock.

It takes a minute or two and then Nick untangles his hands, gets the heels of both palms on Ellis' shoulders and shoves him back: strong and dangerous and grating. It's more than enough to knock him off balance, to jam the younger guy back on his heels and ass, get his hand out of Nick's goddamn pants, Jesus Christ.

Immediately apologetic: "Shit, what'd I do wrong? Man I'm sorry, my hands are colder than shit."

"Ellis," Nick growls, chest hitching. Stop that, he tells himself. "Do you ever shut up?"

"Well sometimes. This one time Keith and me did a vow of silence and--"

Nick twists forward, bangs both knees in the process of snagging Ellis' leg and dragging him, low yelp included, the few inches back across the floor to him. The way the   
Nick uses his hands isn’t exactly subtle or smooth, but it gets the underwear out of the way and exposes Ellis' half hard cock. And then, miracle of fucking goddamn miracles, Ellis doesn't make a peep outside of low short noises from the back of his throat as Nick jerks him off out in the open.

It's feels good, right and when Ellis stiffens, heels scraping the floorboards - kicks the cards all over - and chest hollows as he comes, the sound he makes is like relief. It's simple and easy to understand.

 

Outside New Orleans Nick uses twenty bucks on the vending machines at a highway rest stop to get them a hearty breakfast of Hostess cupcakes and Gatorade. Breaking open the plastic facing of the machine wouldn’t make him feel half as important as digging through his wallet does.


End file.
